Our Legendary Venetian Holiday

Some years ago, in a distant, halcyon past redolent of youthful vigor and young love, I packed my bags and boarded a plane bound for Venice. For me, La Serenissima wasn’t just a vacation destination. It was where I would see my wife for the first time in six months, and where we would spend an enchanted week of culture, learning, and most importantly togetherness. Because while I had been in the United States, working a normal job and living in a normal suburb, she had been dodging bullets and death threats in one of the Middle East’s most unstable countries, working in decidedly un-normal conditions. When an opportunity came up for her to get away for a short vacation, we decided to meet in the middle; and after considering a number of worthy candidates—Paris, Vienna, Rome—we settled on as tranquil an environment as we could find, to form the greatest possible contrast with her quotidian reality. The Most Serene City fit the bill perfectly.

And so we did—I arrived at the airport in Venice just hours before she did, met her at arrivals with an enormous smile and commensurate hug, and swept her off to the apartment that I had pre-arranged for us on the Giudecca. The week was pure magic—we marveled at the art in the Doge’s palace and the Basilica di San Marco, not to mention in a dozen other palazzi all over the city; the city itself was a museum for an architecture lover like her, with the crazy conglomeration of Byzantine and Renaissance façades looking out onto the canals. We rode the vaporetti up and down the Grand Canal, under the stately stone bridges with their intricate reliefs and sordid histories; we rode them around the city’s Medieval walls, erected to defend against incursions by Germanic chieftans, Ottoman sultans, and Florentine dukes; we crossed the waters further afield to Murano, where intricate glasswork from Venetian artisans has been refracting sunlight into beautiful displays for nearly a thousand years. Dressed in our stateliest, we took in a symphony in the city’s pre-Napoleonic grand concert hall; when we weren’t being nearly so cultured we challenged ourselves to eat as many flavors of the city’s gelato as humanly possible. And all the while we were together, blissfully happy to have erased—at least temporarily—the ten time zones that had separated us for the past year.

That vacation was legendary. It has a permanent aura, a golden frame, that enshrines it as one of the Best Times of My Life. I look back on pictures, or simply recall moments in my mind, and the joy that I felt then returns to me. It has been over five years since then, and I believe that my wife and I were acting out an Italian love story without equal in all the legends and mythology of that inventive country.

What do I not remember about that trip? Unless we are specifically recalling it, I do not remember how the electricity in our apartment went out one night, leaving us stranded in darkness, without a stove to cook on and without air conditioning to make the hot Venetian summer nights bearable. I do not remember how I walked across the Giudecca to buy a pizza that night, and asked them to light a candle for me, as we had no matches and the stores were closed, and how I carefully protected that flame for my entire transit of the island, until as I stood on my doorstep a sudden gust of wind snuffed out our hopes for evening light. I also don’t remember how, with the windows open to make the hot air bearable, we both ended up bitten by a small army of mosquitos, or how all this went on for several days because we couldn’t get hold of the landlord. (For the record: someone eventually left the circuit breaker room unlocked and unattended one morning, and I stole in and restored modernity to our dwelling.) I also generally don’t remember how, the very night that we attended the symphony in our best clothing and most attractive—read: uncomfortable—shoes, the vaporetto drivers went on strike and left us with a mile-and-a-half walk home over quaint and uneven cobblestone, which was so punishing on my wife’s feet that we could walk nowhere the next day. Or how the only possible flights that we could take out of Venice at the end of the week were at five in the morning, meaning that we were waiting for the airport bus on the side of the road at two o’clock on our last night. And all this says nothing of a food “adventure” or two.

Emotional filtering and our outlook on life

What gives? Why do I not remember the painful, the less-than-perfect, parts of that vacation? At first, you might think it was because, heck, I was in Venice! But I’ve been on vacations before where things also did not go well, and I remember that they didn’t go well. But this was different: I wasn’t there to pretend I was cultured, or to hit the night life—really, I could have been not in Venice at all—but I was there to see my new wife, and it had been a long time, and that was the most important thing. And that went perfectly. I showed up. She showed up. Nothing else was really necessary.

Our brains tend to filter, and my brain filters the mild (in retrospect) inconveniences out of the overwhelming success of the trip at large. There is no need for me to dwell on the propensity of the Italians to strike, or my general distaste for mosquitoes, or any of the other failings of circumstance that were part of the entire tapestry of our vacation. A few misplaced brushstrokes do not mar the masterpiece. I believe that our brains do this sort of filtering automatically, based upon our goals with respect to the memories. Do I want to remember how painful it was to get my graduate degree? Then I remember the late nights in the lab, the difficult discussions with my thesis advisor, the feeling of uncertainty and drift that pervaded my relationship to my work. Or do I want to remember the joys of my sojourn at one of the nation’s best (and most beautiful) universities? Then I remember the blooming of the dogwoods in the spring, the large cohort of friends that I made, the delight of learning new things, and the circumstances of meeting my future wife. I choose which set of memories to dwell on. I choose whether it was a good or a bad time.

How we choose to approach our memories is an indicator of how we view our lives—if we adopt a narrative of victimization, we are sure to see persecution all around; if a narrative of misfortune, we will look back to see poor choices and an endless stream of bad circumstance. But if our life narrative is one of advancement, joy, and triumph, then that is what we will see in the flow of our memories.

Some people have more misfortune than most, and some have more triumph than most. Objective differences in our lives exist and are important. But those objective differences are usually not the things that drive our personal narratives. Some incredibly successful people are incredibly depressed, and many that our world would consider most misfortunate are some of its happiest people. I think we’ve all heard the stories of the jaded Westerner visiting a poor country and making observations of the happiness found among the poor of the place. Poverty or wealth have little to do with happiness—this much is substantiated scientifically. Instead it’s a set of conscious choices that pervade our subconscious approach to life.

Translating to now

If all of the foregoing is relevant to memories, then it is also relevant to our experience of the present. Am I happy with my life right now? The answer in large part is determined by what I fixate on. For example, I spent just enough time traveling for work in the State of New York this year that I’m required to file an income tax return there, despite having never lived there or having any connection whatsoever with the place. That’s going to suck a bunch of hours out of my life during Spring 2016 as I figure out how to fill out yet another set of forms, along with my regular state and federal tax forms. I hate paperwork.

On the other hand, I had a job that was mostly interesting, challenging, and that advanced the frontiers of science during 2015. I got to visit my grandmother’s childhood home outside of Buffalo and Niagara Falls during my weekends in New York. I even managed to swing an anniversary trip to New York City with my wife as a result of the traveling. And the company topped off my income to cover the extra expense of New York taxes.

So what am I going to focus on? The drag of filling out some extra paperwork? Or the awesomeness that surrounded and resulted from my circumstance? I choose to be positive.

And this, I believe, is the definition of gratitude: to recognize the good in life, and to give it priority over the bad. It’s not a function of the good-to-bad ratio. That can be quite small, and a person can still be grateful. It’s a function of the amount of attention given to the good compared with attention focused on the bad. While that’s not necessarily an easy mental discipline, it nevertheless is a discipline. A choice to be made.

So file the bad things in life away into a mental “to-do” folder, and deal with them expeditiously. Then celebrate the good and give it center stage. Developing gratitude for the blessings in life, despite whatever else might be there, is one of the essential components of Jailbreak. It’s the shovel with which the escape tunnel is dug.

For those in the US, happy Thanksgiving!

Today, I walked in sand.

Very fine, very dry sand is a fluid; it flows around your feet when you step in it, and runs downhill in little rivulets; the wind blows across its surface and sends up a spray, a mist of microscopic particles that caresses your bare legs and wets your clothes with a golden film of grit.  It engulfs in the collective mass of its atoms everything that stands in its path, a flash flood—though times in decades—that drowns beneath it anything too slow to get out of its way. Plants, rocks, tools, huts, houses and cities all succumb to the advance of the silica tide.

Walking on sand works where walking on water does not because the friction between the fundamental particles of the sand fluid exceeds that between water molecules. Step in the ocean, and the water parts before your foot: it displaced the water throughout the ocean, and could be measured an world away, if we but had instruments sensitive enough. But sand is not so yielding. It will accommodate your foot up to a certain point, allowing you to displace its particles; but at some point you have pushed too much, and no more sand will move before your step. The obstinacy of sand is what lets us walk on it. Its fluidity is what makes the walking hard.

In the desert, where this fine, dry sand lives, the wind whips up the its surface into an everlasting tempest. Towering sunburnt waves rise in formation, beating toward the sky in their decades-long, silent uprising against the tyranny of the wind. The dunes are everlasting, yet ever-changing. Moment by moment the wind sculpts and shapes their surfaces, adding here, subtracting there, so that the patterns written in breezy calligraphy down the slopes are never the same, whether comparing between points in space or points in time. But cease to consider the details of the patterns; stand upright, shield your eyes, and consider the sand en masse.  By looking at the dunes writ large, you are seeing statistically; andthe  statistics of the sands are constant throughout your view. The consistent distribution of rivulet widths, lengths, and branching patterns; the distributions of the dune heights and angles; the regularity of these can be seen at a glance. And so it goes—sand particles, on our scale, are identical; they form wildly different patterns when we observe their interactions up close; and their behavior becomes regular again as we pull away further. The sands are like people. We are all made from the same mould, from the same physical stuff; yet each one of us is radically different from every other one; yet societies the world over display a surprising regularity in customs and habits.

Who knows who the first people were to walk these sands? Did they survive the encounter, or did they grow weary, stop for a short rest, and then, when their rest extended too long, drown in the hot glacial deluge? Might they now form part of these sands on which I am walking?

It must have been thousands of years ago. Everything has changed since then. When the sun has gone down, I can see lights on the horizon—a city is nearby, filled with the buzz of electricity and information and civilization. The dome overhead, in which then hung only stars, now is home to airplanes and satellites whose trajectories may be followed across the ebony skies. And I can stand in this spot with no worries about what I shall eat, or what I shall drink, or if I shall ever make it to my destination. Indeed, this is my destination.

But to say all has changed is to think too small. If I ignore the city, and ignore the satellites, and look at the dunes; there, there I see what that first traveler saw. As if side by side, we see the same patterns in the sand and the shield our eyes from the same sun. In all probability my lungs contain several oxygen and nitrogen atoms that were in his lungs as he stood here, he sharing my view and I his. And there is an immutability to this; man may be about his business, changing everything in his power to change, and yet in the sand the patterns persist. Man may not change those. He may dig up the sand, and pour it out on a far  continent; but the wind will follow it there, and caress it into its eternal shapes, and it will continue to flow and engulf as it has since the beginning of time.

When the wind is blowing, my footprints disappear almost immediately as I walk away. My walk has not disturbed the sand in its massive progress. It does not care. Of whatever significance my walk is to me, the sand does not care.

Let’s remember this. Our universes revolve around ourselves because we see through our own eyes and act through our own bodies. But in realizing that our volition extends only as far as ourselves, we break the illusion that our wants and desires order the objective universe.  Even the most powerful people on Earth have no power to change the forces of nature, the combination of winds and friction that sculpt they sands. We are small, and our ambitions are small.

Our efforts are of grand import in our own lives; we have the power to shape our destinies and overcome odds. We are empowered to leave footprints in the sand, and to choose the direction in which they go. The philosophy of Jailbreak is all about thoughtfully choosing that path. If possible, we may lead others to a limited degree. But let us not have too grand an opinion of ourselves.  It is to our benefit to acknowledge that we are part of a grander scheme, and the wind will wipe away our traces when we are gone. And this is for the good; those who come after us will have the view unspoiled.

Silence. So many kinds of silence. Deep, still pools of tranquility. Whispering voices of tentative zephyrs stroking millions of paper mâché leaves in autumn forests. Gentle hums of indistinct human voices murmuring prayers in a stretching cathedral. The never-ending roar of the city, ceaseless as the mountain waterfall. Silence is everywhere, if you can find it, because it’s not an imposed axiom of environment, but a transcendent construction—or rather emergence—of the mind.

Food, shelter: the basic needs of human life, the can’t-do-withouts of physical existence. Love: the sine qua non of spiritual existence. Silence: in which everything finds its value, its authenticity, its reliability.

You say, How can silence be as important as food and shelter? Well how then is rain more important than sunshine to a growing flower? It is all needed, all important; but the Scriptural wisdom of the ancient maintains that “better is a little on the rooftop than plenty in a house of strife”.

Or how can silence outweigh the importance of love? It doesn’t, any more than the sense of taste outweighs the importance of eating. The latter can be had without the former. But who truly experiences the joy of a wonderful food without tasting it? And who really knows love if he has never rested, silently, secure in the knowledge that he loves and is loved unconditionally, apart from all words and demonstrations?

Silence is not well-regarded in the social and technological milieu pulsing on our every side. In the office, emails and phone calls and stop-ins and meetings and reports shout into our every moment, demanding our attention and response; productivity, the aim of every manager, comes to be defined not by the quality of thought and product you create, but rather by how much you add to the noise. Stay quiet, and risk being ignored in the daily fracas. It’s nearly impossible to drown out, anyway. In the wild, sounds that are quiet and distant indicate something not important; the loud and immediate requires our attention. But there is no dissipation in the electronic, no attenuation of things unimportant; everything shouts equally loud in an email box. Other people’s problems in a meeting take as much of your attention as your own. Put up filters to allow yourself to think, and be rebuked because you are unresponsive.

Not that too many have that problem: the banishing of silence from our lives outside of work is big business. Apple made sure we could distract ourselves with infinite variety when it introduced the iPod; the iPhone ensured that we could distract ourselves with the infinity of the Internet when no one was available to talk. The business of distraction is not just recently lucrative either: I suspect the Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, and the great novelists all filled and monetized a social yearning for distraction; Hollywood and the rest of the modern entertainment industry has been minting money from it for years. And if that’s a bad thing—nuance is not dead here—it’s not the fault of companies, technologies, or franchises. It’s our fault, for so willingly and easily distracting ourselves. All the time.

Taking in a little news helps keep us informed about our world. Obsessively watching cable news networks creates an echo chamber of too-strident opinions that leaves out ears ringing and our minds thinking of nothing else. Who doesn’t know folks who will divert any conversation into politics within five minutes of saying hello? The same is true of celebrity gossip. The financial press. Food!—the quasi-religious obsession of millions of paleos, primals, vegans, locavores, Monsanto-haters, fair-traders…There can be too much of a good thing, and we all go there. Sometimes our obsessions qualify us as quirky, sometimes as self-righteous pricks. Either way, obsessions need fuel like fire, and we choose what we feed ourselves. And not only do we choose what to feed on—we choose to feed in the first place. Nobody ever said that was required.

Constantly eating more food than we need leads to adverse systemic consequences for our bodies. Why should it not also be true of our minds? What would we be like if we gave ourselves time—quiet time—to digest what we put in our minds? Would we be a community of people who actually think for ourselves about important issues, instead of mouthpieces for our favorite media outlets? Would we shine with a light of true individuality, rather than with the dull reflection of groupthink emanating from our Facebook feeds?  Would we be comfortable voicing the produce of our minds in deep conversation, instead of referencing someone else, experts who, in all reality, have no more innate intelligence or ability than we do? Are we consuming the mental equivalent of huge amounts of empty calories, and suffering mental obesity as a result? Could we not rather consume small quantities of nutritious material and allow ourselves to truly absorb its goodness?

Silence is where we digest. Where we allow our mental filters to clear the detritus of our chaotic lives from the flow of our consciousness. It’s a detox, a cleansing, a freeing.  It’s where the rust falls off our souls and the scales fall from our eyes, and where we are finally able to see the world for ourselves and, more importantly, where we can see ourselves for ourselves. In the midst of a silent moment, when no one else has our ear or attention, we can finally listen to our own voice and find out what we actually think and who we actually are.  We find answers to questions about ourselves and discover which questions about the world are truly important to us. What is golden stays with us after the silence has polished away all the dross.

But this is all obvious. Monks of every religion have for millennia taken vows of silence to connect to themselves and something higher. Artists, authors and poets retreat to the mountains or the beaches or Venice—anywhere but their normal here—to free their hands from the quotidian grasping so that they can instead reach inside themselves and unearth that which is truly extraordinary. Maybe the best of them produce something of great worth to others. But all of them produce that which is of great worth to themselves. And what gives value to any of it? What gives value to anything? Scarcity—that great economic force that makes air free and diamond dear. So few people find their own voice, the true expression of who they are. But only we can find ourselves, and there is only one of us. No one else can sell us ourselves or mass produce our souls. To ourselves, we are the scarcest of resources the universe has ever known.

Yesterday I walked, aimlessly, through the river parklands in Perth, Australia; today, I set out to find some peace near LAX while laid over on my way home. I find walking to be my quickest way to silence the mind. It’s meditative: one foot, next foot, straight line, breathe in, breathe out. It takes me far from where I was, surrounds me with novelty. If it doesn’t require much thought—the danger of being hit by a car is low, I’m not late for anything, I’m not likely to be mugged—then my mind is free to wander, shake off its stiffness, stretch out. Silence outside promotes silence inside: the Kookaburra calls of the Perth parklands are better that the searing, stinking fumes of the LAX arrivals level. But it’s the act, the motion, that leads to transcendence. History is full of pilgrimages, Caminos de Santiago, that lose their power if motors are involved. There is no rhythm in the seat of a car: the crankshaft converts the cadence of the  combustion to smooth rotary motion. Airplane jets have no rhythm to begin with. Physically nothing is different than sitting at home. But walking, perambulation, keeps the mind alert and clear at the same time. Second best is the rhythmic swaying of horseback: if they were so inclined, the solitary cowboys of the West must have been the most contemplative of men. Is it any wonder that King David, a man after God’s own heart, was found among the lonely shepherds of Israel? The true value in a pilgrimage is, cliché, in the journey rather than the destination. I don’t know much about the Muslim hajj, but I hope it provides their faithful more peaceful contemplation than the pictures suggest.

We take moments of silence to remember those who have given their all in sacrifice to a higher purpose—defending the cause of freedom, spreading hope to a dying world—and in that silence we find remembrance and understanding. But when we can, we should go beyond dipping our toes in those clear, bracing waters; we should wade in, surrounding ourselves in silence, dive deep, hold our breaths, and, gasping, throw ourselves back on the shores of daily life with the peace that we found still dripping from us. We should give big wet hugs to the people we meet there. And when we’re comfortable enough in our own skins, we should invite those we love to join us…because peaceful silence, together, can be the conditioning oil to repair the dry, cracked leather of our relationships. And if all the world joined us, what better people we might be; what a multitude of hurts would be healed; and how much more peace would find its welcome in the world?

So find your silence. You need it. And the world needs you to find it. Whatever your place, whatever you have to give to the world, do this first: let silent contemplation be your offering.